The Balm in Gilead

She's won the Orange Prize for her latest novel, Home, and her Pulitzer-Prize winning bestseller, Gilead, is cited on President Obama's Facebook page as one of his favourite books, alongside the Bible. Marilynne Robinson describes herself as a liberal Protestant believer and churchgoer, but literary critics describe her as "the most intellectually ambitious novelist in the English language", and "the world's best writer of prose." This week on Encounter, we find out why.

Transcript

Reader: I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, 'Where?' and I said, To be with the good Lord, and you said, Why? and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old. And you put your hand in my hand, and you said, You aren't very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you've had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life.

From Gilead (Virago, 2005)

MUSIC

Carmel Howard: It's 1956 in the small town of Gilead in Iowa, and a Congregationalist minister, Reverend John Ames, is beginning a letter to his young son. Ames is 76 years old, and a late marriage has brought him unexpected happiness, but his heart is failing, and this letter is a kind of last testament to his son.

Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead is that letter, and it's calm, wise and beautiful to read. But don't be fooled by its serenity. Beneath its measured tone, Gilead is a complex and smouldering tale.

SINGING

Carmel Howard: Welcome to Encounter on ABC Radio National. I'm Carmel Howard. This week, a program about the American novelist Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping, Home, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Gilead, which we'll be hearing from throughout the program.

It's been said that she's the world's best writer of prose, and that her language has a spiritual force that's very rare in contemporary fiction. But Marilynne Robinson is a rarity in the world of literature for more than just her style.

She's a liberal Protestant believer and churchgoer who sometimes delivers the sermons at her Congregationalist church in Iowa. She's the author of highly acclaimed literary masterpieces that raise profound theological, historical, aesthetic and moral questions - and they sell.

Marilynne Robinson's narrator in the novel Gilead Reverend John Ames, is also something of a rarity in the world of literature. He's a clergyman who's portrayed as neither a fraud nor a fool. Ames is a good man, who strives to be better; and I began with my conversation with Marilynne Robinson by asking her how she managed to make the Good Reverend such an interesting and moving character.

Marilynne Robinson: It seems to me as if it's really quite difficult to be good, and to be good in any meaningful sense of the word takes a great deal of self-discipline and introspection. I don't know where the idea has come from, really, that bad people are more interesting. You know, they have their charms, but I think that a really good person is a really interesting person by definition.

I have a long history of being a church member and I have watched ministers with interest and admiration over the years. I would have been doing something false if I had represented him otherwise than sympathetically.

Sarah Churchwell: As a professional book critic you learn to distance yourself emotionally from certain kinds of books because you switch into kind of analytical mode. And this was one of the first books that made me cry in years, which is actually really difficult to do to me. But I was crying more from the beauty of it. It's a remarkable book intellectually, it's a remarkable book aesthetically, it's so different from most of what is being written today. A lot of people I think struggled with the book because it seems overtly theological and not everybody is particularly welcoming and warm to religion, and I'm certainly not particularly myself either.

But I found that her approach to theology was so philosophical, actually thinking through the questions in an intellectual way instead of in the ways that I think a lot of us think about religion today. Because, you know, there are people who in the name of religion cause an awful lot of trouble in the world, religious questions somehow seem to be precisely that, which people don't have to think through, that it's just 'Well I just believe it, and I'm going to - you know - move on'. And here I saw somebody unbelievably intelligent, working through complex moral and philosophical questions, while telling the story about the history of America, and a very moving story about a man facing death.

Carmel Howard: Dr Sarah Churchwell is a journalist and a senior lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia.

Sarah Churchwell: One of the things that Robinson does in the book, it frustrated me, I felt like so many readers and reviewers missed; Gilead seems to be a book about a 76-year-old white man living in an entirely white town in Iowa in 1956. And yet, it is also a book about race, and it is a book about racism.

And one of Ames' greatest faults as I read the book, is that he is passive when it comes to questions about racial social justice. And he doesn't actually have the conviction that his grandfather had. Ames is not as generous, and his talent is not as generous as it ought to be, and that is his epiphany at the end. He says 'This town could be -' he says something like, 'It could be on the floor of hell for all the truth there is in it, and that's my fault as much as anyone's'.

That's a remarkable thing for such a good man and a good Reverend to say. He is I think, confronting some profound moral failures in the town, but Robinson does it so quietly, and so subtly that it's very easy to miss.

Carmel Howard: Much of the story that Ames tells is about his father and his abolitionist grandfather, who, like Ames, were also ministers. As Gilead develops, it becomes clear how the lives of these three men have been shaped by the tumultuous history of the Midwest. And it's an expected history - one that Robinson herself first learned about when she moved to Iowa more than 20 years ago, to teach at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Marilynne Robinson:Gilead is based on a town in south-western Iowa called Tabor, which was founded by a minister named John Todd, who brought a group from Oberlin college to make a settlement there, the purpose of it being to create a sort of fallback for abolitionists like John Brown and Jim Lane where they could rest and heal. And he kept actually 500 rifles in his cellar and a canon in his barn. He was a model for the grandfather, for Ames' grandfather.

The people who came into the Middle West to resist the incursions of slavery and to end slavery, were very theologically motivated. They believed in the divinity, as it were, of human beings - that they were made of the image of God. There were a surprisingly large number of ministers that came out into the Middle West and strove mightily in the cause of abolition, and the town of Tabor became the sort of focus of this whole project that was carried on in the early 19th century, of creating towns and also colleges that educated women, that were racially integrated. And that ran the underground railroad and that printed abolitionist materials and mailed them all over the country so that the Middle West would not be penetrated by the economics of slavery that was so powerful in the South.

Reader: My grandfather told me once about a vision he'd had when he was still living in Maine, and not yet sixteen. He had fallen asleep by the fire, worn out from a day helping his father pull stumps. Someone touched him on the shoulder, and when he looked up, there was the Lord, holding out his arms to him, which were bound in chains. My grandfather said, 'Those irons had rankled right down to his bones'. He told me that as the saddest fact and eyed me with that one seraph eye he had, the old grief fresh in it. He said he knew then that he had to come to Kansas and make himself useful to the cause of abolition. To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear. I have a lot of respect for that view. When I spoke to my father about the vision he had described to me, my father just nodded and said, 'It was the times.' He himself never claimed any such experience, and he seemed to want to assure me I need not fear that the Lord would come to me with His sorrows. And I took comfort in the assurance. That is a remarkable thing to consider.

From Gilead (Virago 2005)

Sarah Churchwell: The way that it works, is that Ames is an old man. And technically she does something brilliant here: because he's an old man, his thoughts wander, the way an old man's would, and so you feel as if you're just drifting along with this amiable, intelligent man as he kind of reminisces in a very kind of affable way. And yet, if you go back and trace through, she gives the reader almost clues, and drops some little bits of historical data, and the more that you know about American history the more those little moments explode with meaning.

What he tells us over the course of the story is that his grandfather came from Maine, to Kansas in the 1830s, and he came to fight with the Freesoilers. What that means in American history is that his grandfather was part of the abolitionist movement that began in the spirit of reform that swept out of the second great awakening, so it's a religious reform movement which was what brought about the end of slavery. It actually came about because of a radical Christian imperative - that it was un-Christian, immoral and unjust to have slaves, and a whole wave of them went to Kansas to fight with John Brown, the radical abolitionist, to fight against the slave holders who were coming up from Missouri. And what they did was, they fought in Kansas, they actually fought on the border of Western Iowa and Kansas, in skirmishes in 1856, which is now known as Bloody Kansas. And people have completely forgotten this.

But what Robinson does is suggest that, in America, we think about the Civil War, if we think about it at all, which some people don't, as having been fought of course over North and South. But actually, it began in the West, it began in the Midwest, began at the border of Iowa and Kansas. She sets her book exactly 100 years later, in 1956, which is the year of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, but she never mentions that in Gilead.

But if you think about the history, the novel actually spans in a few generations the precise century from the beginning of the Civil War to the beginning of Civil Rights, and the question that the novel is asking is, What happened to that passion for racial justice? Because it has been completely submerged, and forgotten. There's a great deal of interest in the novel I think about amnesia. Ames is telling his son this because Ames is going to die before his son grows up, to let him know this history, and what I think Robinson is doing for the American reader, and hopefully for the global reader, is to say 'You know how you think that Iowa is this bastion of white, conservative heartland, reactionary - because of course she's also writing Gilead as Bush and Kerry are fighting over the 2004 election, and Iowa went with Bush - and I think what she's doing is excavating the radical past of the American heartland.

She quotes the General Grant line in Gilead more than once. Grant called Iowa 'the shining star of radicalism.' Well today, that's a remarkable phrase to read, I mean it's actually funny - Iowa? the shining star of radicalism? In America, that's absolutely impossible. You know, Iowa is precisely the opposite of radical, and yet it has this radical past, and that's the story that she's trying to remind us of. But the Civil War began in important ways in the Midwest.

Marilynne Robinson: The State of Iowa has a very interesting history, and before it was a State, while it was still a territory, it outlines slavery within its borders in 1839, and it integrated its school system while it was still a territory. It had never had any anti-miscegenation laws. There are many ways in which it was way ahead of the rest of the country in terms of race relations. And yet at the same time, while this is true and in many ways remained true, there's a sort of forgetfulness that made it not as exceptional as it should have been. That's the historical question - how does this idealism flare and then go into eclipse, and then somehow or other, persist in the landscape even though to the superficial eye you might never know that it persists in the landscape. That's a great mystery to me.

Carmel Howard: The eclipse of idealism is also a great mystery to the character of John Ames' Grandfather. A fiery old abolitionist, he grows increasingly disheartened and disgusted as he watches a post-Civil War America pave the way for racial injustice. In this next extract from Gilead, Ames recalls a pivotal moment between his grandfather and his father.

Reader: They were silent for some time. Then my father said, 'Did my sermon offend you in some way? Those few words you heard of it.' The old man shrugged. 'Nothing in it to offend. I just wanted to hear some preaching. So I went over to the Negro church.' After a minute, my father asked, 'Well , did you hear some preaching?' My grandfather shrugged, 'The text was "Love your Enemies."' 'That seems to me to be an excellent text in the circumstances', my father said. This was just after somebody set that fire behind the church that I mentioned earlier. The old man said, 'Very Christian.' My father said, 'You sound disappointed, Reverend.' My grandfather put his head in his hands. He said, 'Reverend, no words could be bitter enough, no day could be long enough. There is just no end to it. Disappointment, I eat and drink it. I wake and sleep it.'

From Gilead (Virago 2005)

Carmel Howard: The tensions between John Ames' pacifist father and his radical, visionary grandfather, culminate in the grandfather leaving Gilead, to die alone in Kansas, and Ames often ruminates on the quest he and his father undertook years later to find the grandfather's abandoned grave. The unresolved bitterness and tensions between his father and grandfather leave Ames with a kind of forgetful complacency towards his town's original vision of racial justice. Sarah Churchwell puts this complacency into context.

Sarah Churchwell: One of the ironies, the historical ironies, that Gilead and Home are both unpicking, it's kind of implicated in American history, you have to know a little bit about American history to get the irony, but of course the Republican party was originally founded to follow Lincoln. The Republican party was the abolitionist party, that's what it was invented to be, and it comes into existence in the 1850s precisely as the party of Lincoln that will fight slavery. And the Democrats were the agrarian south, the Democrats were pro-slavery. And the Civil War was fought between Republicans and Democrats, where from our point of view the Democrats were morally wrong, and the Republicans were morally right.

What she does then is trace then the irony that by the time you get to the 1950s, somebody like John Ames, who's basically a good man as we've said, actually votes Republican because everybody votes Republican because his grandfather voted Republican. But his grandfather voted Republican out of moral conviction; his grandfather voted Republican to fight slavery. John Ames does it out of habit. He does it because he can't think to do anything else. And what he says in Gilead is that he'll vote for Eisenhower if he lives. Well Eisenhower was against civil rights, Eisenhower was against bussing, he was not upholding it. So the irony there is that the meaning of Republicanism in that 100 years has completely reversed itself.

Reader: Not long afterwards, my Grandfather was gone. He left a note lying on the kitchen table which said, 'No good has come, no evil is ended. That is your peace. Without vision, people perish. The Lord bless you and keep you.' I still have that note; I saved it in my Bible.

From Gilead (Virago 2005)

Carmel Howard: You're listening to Encounter on ABC Radio National, and a program about the American writer, Marilynne Robinson.

Robinson's Gilead isn't only concerned with the way we see the past. It's also concerned with the way we see the world in the present, and the scope for revelation in what we see.

This focus on perception as a form of revelation is something Robinson attributes to her favourite theologian, the 16th century French reformer, John Calvin.

In her essay collection The Death of Adam, she rejects the dour Calvin of stereotypes, and reclaims him as a central and brilliant figure in Western history.

She believes Calvin's theology of perception had a formative influence on her own way of seeing the world.

Marilynne Robinson: I think it affected me very deeply before I knew that it was Calvin that was affecting me, because I was sort of brought up in his theological tradition, a sort of off and on Presbyterian through my childhood, and it was simply given to me as true that the world was communicative, that God was present and intentional in what we perceived, although not directly, because of our incapacities. But the idea of the sort of immanence and transparency that the world represents, and the idea of other human beings as being images of God, with the really sort of daunting implications that that carries, I think that that was important to me before I had any idea that there was a specific theological source for it. I thought that was just what people thought.

Cynthia Rigby: I think that Gilead is about this idea of coming to perceive God's love for us. Calvin's ministry was all about trying to help people see that God had claimed them, unconditionally. He wasn't happy with the doctrine of the Roman church of the day, something called implicit faith, which is that if people didn't perceive God's presence with them, they could simply rely on the church to perceive it for them.

Carmel Howard: The Reverend Dr Cynthia Rigby is the Brown Professor of Theology at Austin Theological Seminary in Texas. She sees many connections between Calvin's theology of perception and Robinson's writing.

Cynthia Rigby: Calvin and the other reformers wanted people to have faith experiences for themselves. That's why he and Martin Luther risked their lives really, to translate the Bible into the vernacular and Calvin translated his Institutes into the vernacular and he was a very hands-on sort of pastor, calling people in when they didn't come to church on Sunday morning. He wanted to know why, he wanted to know how they were interpreting the sermon. He has a reputation for being very meddly in people's lives, and overstepping on the one hand, but he did it because he wanted people to be able to have the kind of joy that comes with perceiving God's presence, God's love. And John Ames lives with that perception. All the way through the book he's pausing and he's enjoying the weather, and he's enjoying the rainbows of light that come with the water that his young son is playing in in the front yard, and he laments leaving the world. And this is all connected to his reflection on Calvin.

Reader: As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the War Memorial - if you remember them - and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing of the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they'd fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once, and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is only an apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There's a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

From Gilead (Virago: 2005)

Sarah Churchwell: He says that he can't imagine a heaven that wouldn't let you remember the beauty of this world, because that wouldn't be what heaven would look like. It would just be the world transfigured, and that it would just be shining and beautiful and glorious. And there tends to be this idea in religion, in our kind of crude, cheap versions of religion, that says that religion finds this world somehow contemptible, or somehow always full of failure and not quite good enough. It's inadequate and inferior to heaven, and yet what she says is, it's basically, it is this world, this is the beautiful part of it, it just gets even better. And there is something that is very life-affirming and very kind of generous and validating of all of our own experiences.

Carmel Howard: Literary critic and journalist, Dr Sarah Churchwell, from the University of East Anglia.

It may seem incongruous to some that such a wondrous view of this world could stem from the thought of John Calvin. Didn't he believe that Christians are called to despise this world, in deference to the Kingdom of God? Well, in her essays on Calvin, Marilynne Robinson suggests the reason people misunderstand Calvin's view of the world is because they've lost sight of the 'conceptual problem' underlying his theology. The Reverend Dr Cynthia Rigby explains this problem.

Cynthia Rigby: The conceptual problem lies at the heart of everything that Calvin does and says, that the God who is sovereign, the god who is all-powerful, at the same time is also the God who loves us, and calls us by name. And these ideas are logically irreconcilable, and we live in the dialectic between them, according to Calvin, and the dialectic, the tension between them, drives all of his theology. So the stereotype of Calvin tends to divorce God's sovereignty from this idea of God's particular involvement with us. And once those things are divorced, you've got a Calvin talking about divine providence as though what that means is that God is sitting up in heaven somewhere, looking at a computer monitor, hitting either the Smite button or the Save button, depending on whatever it is that God wants to do. That is utterly antithetical to the image of God that Calvin portrays.

Once you have a conceptual problem in place, it's easier to understand how it is that Ames suggests that this world will not be forgotten. That is because God loves this world, the Bible teaches that 'For God so loved the world ...' God has, as Calvin says, accommodated God's self to the world.So he gives us a way of thinking about heaven and the kingdom of God, that's not escapist, but actually deepens our appreciation for this world. So many eschatologies, so many doctrines of the end times, as we call them in theology, give people reason to not pay attention to the ordinary things of this world, but to set their sights on heaven, and I'm thinking in particular about this left behind series, which I'm sure has been circulating in Australia, as it has been all over the world, and just how escapist that notion of the future is, and that notion of heaven and that notion of salvation and that understanding of God. And one thing that Calvin helps us with, is to have ways of speaking about what it is that God desires without escaping into that, away from what God has given us in this moment, on this day, with these people who we're with even now.

Reader: Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me because it makes us artists of our behaviour, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic, rather than morally judgmental, in the ordinary sense...I do like Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God's enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child, even when he is in every way a form in your heart. 'He has a mind of his own', Boughton used to say when that son of his was up to something, and he meant it as praise, he really did.

From Gilead (Virago: 2005)

Marilynne Robinson: When I came across that idea in Calvin, I was very deeply pleased. It was one of things where it opened a new way of looking at the world for me. I think that one of the experiences that people have that makes them uneasy with religion often, is that they know people whom they understand as ethically deficient or whatever, at the same time that they just really love them, and they have good reasons to love them, which might not have anything to do with trusting them or benefiting from them, or anything else, they love them aesthetically, you know, in terms of the charm of the person in a way, the grace, however unconscious it might be, and the idea that God would be blind to what is in many cases the most interesting or the most beautiful encounter that you yourself have, with another human being. This is disturbing, the alienates one from God, in a way, and I think that the idea that God can love people aesthetically, that King David can be the apple of his eye with all the terrible stuff that he's up to and all the rest of it, you know, that there is this sort of loyalty, a fatherly loyalty of you know, 'that kid can't stay out of trouble, and what a beautiful kid, I can't bear the thought that he would be away from me.' I like that, I think that's wonderful.

Carmel Howard: Where Robinson's first novel Housekeeping explored mothers and daughters, Gilead and Home focus on fathers and sons. The parent-child relationship is a compelling and central theme in Robinson's work.

Marilynne Robinson: It seems to me in many ways the most sort of absolute relationship that you could imagine; the suggestion inheres in it more than any other I think, that there should be absolute loyalty, that forgiveness ought to be very readily given and received, that everything that sustains a child and everything that in a certain sense dignifies a parent, comes from the relationship that passes between them. To me it's the most beautiful and the most sort of absolute human relationship. The fact that the sacred narratives of both testaments tend to be acted out among family groups, I think is a sort of way of exploring the real profundity of human relationships, and the rootedness of meaning and morality and forgiveness and everything else in human interactions.

Reader: Sometimes now when you crawl into my lap and settle against me and I feel that light quick strength of your body and the weightiness of your head, when you're cold from playing in the sprinkler, or warm from your bath at night, and you lie in my arms and fiddle with my beard and tell me what you've been thinking about, that is perfectly pleasant, and I imagine your child self finding me in heaven and jumping into my arms, and there is a great joy in the thought.

From Gilead (Virago 2005)

SINGING

Marilynne Robinson: I became very interested in American vernacular hymns, from the Puritans up to more or less the present time, and one of the things that is extremely consistent is that they talk about heaven as home, and they really are synonyms in that body of music, and the idea of simply being with one's loved ones and at peace with them, and never having to be parted from them again, there is no "golden street" sort of things, it's just the idea of being home and staying home and having that word require its fullest, richest meaning, you know. And in a way my thinking as I wrote the book, was very much along the lines of exploring what that idea meant. One of the hymns 'Softly and Tenderly', is one of these old vernacular hymns that has a refrain 'Come home, come home, ye who are weary come home'. And it's a beautiful idea to me.

Carmel Howard: The complexities of family relationships, and in particular of 'homecoming', are closely explored in Robinson's latest novel Home, which recently won the Orange Prize for fiction. Home narrates the same events as Gilead, but from the perspective of the Boughton family.

Robert Boughton is a retired Presbyterian minister. He's Reverend John Ames' best and oldest friend, and the novel follows the story of Boughton's troubled son, Jack.

Jack Boughton is the family's 'black sheep', an alcoholic with a dishonourable past, who after 20 years, suddenly and surprisingly, returns home.

Jack's greeted by his father with tears of joy, and his welcome is clearly evocative of one of the New Testament's most famous stories of homecoming, the parable of The Prodigal Son. But as the novel Home unfolds, it becomes clear that there's no easy return to be made for a prodigal. Marilynne Robinson finds the parable of the Prodigal Son intriguing.

Marilynne Robinson: Over years of time I've thought about that parable, and I kind of interpret it differently from one day to another. But to extent that it serves as a model for human relationships, it's impossible, the figure of absolute forgiveness, and actually the parable stops just at the point that the prodigal has come back, and I sort of thought what if this were a human father attempting to be that forgiving? He doesn't even forgive the son, it's not even an issue for forgiving, he just welcomes him back, he's just thrilled to have him. And the son never asked to be forgiven, so that isn't even an issue. It's just a sort of an absolutely generous love. I think that that's a very beautiful image that's very, very difficult for a human being to approximate, and perhaps difficult if the prodigal stays for a while, and there's a sort of an ongoing problem of the welcoming of the son, or the reincorporation of the son into the family.

Carmel Howard: Jacks father, and his namesake and godfather, John Ames, both have difficulty forgiving Jack for his many past transgressions. But Jack's younger sister, Glory, from whose perspective Home is narrated, desperately wants him to feel welcomed and loved. Jack remains elusive for much of the novel, only ever hinting at the reasons for his return to Gilead. It's an uneasy coexistence, with the Boughton 'home' often feeling more like exile than refuge.

But amidst the tension and misunderstanding, Glory cooks their favourite food, Jack tends the overgrown garden, and they both perform daily rituals of care for their ailing father. In Gilead, John Ames' eyes are open to the sacred by his mindful perception of the world around him, but in Home, it's the everyday acts of nurture that take on a sacramental quality.

PIANO

Reader: How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her Mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought, and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, You can come down to dinner now, and no-one will say a thing to bother you, unless you've forgotten to wash your hands/ And her father would offer the grace, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around his table.

She wished it mattered more that the three of them loved one another. Or mattered less, since guilt and disappointment seemed to batten on love. Her father and brother were both laid low by grief, as if it were a sickness, and she had nothing better to offer them than chicken and dumplings. But the thought that she could speak to them in their weary sleep, with the memory of comfort, lifted her spirits a little. There was a nice young hen in the refrigerator, and there were carrots.

From Home (Virago 2008)

Marilynne Robinson: It seems to me as if from the Biblical point of view, sacraments actually interpret the kindnesses - the sustaining actions - that people take toward one another. Of course, coming from a Protestant point of view, there are only two sacraments really, feeding and blessing. But I do think that the material world, the physicality of the world, is communicated in this profound way, and we use it to sustain each other and to respect each other, and to shelter each other; and that all seems to me to be intrinsically sacred, as if we're given the means to behave sacramentally, in the very nature of being itself.

Cynthia Rigby: I think what she's talking about is what we call in theology, Kairos, which is the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God into this world on this earth, and I think that what Home is about is the Kingdom of Heaven actually breaking into the Boughton home, and even the kitchen - most of that takes place in the kitchen. Now there are a few scenes in the barn and a few scenes upstairs, but it's there, in the midst of the ordinary day-to-day activities that unconditional love is witnessed, that hope is witnessed. So I think what Robinson is talking about here, which is again reflecting what Calvin taught, is God's providential hand involved in the ordinary things of our day-to-day existence, and what's going on in the kitchen is this constant communion, this coming together around the table, this nurturing and this feeding of one another, and this hope that in the taking of the elements, even if the elements are only bad coffee, Glory keeps making this bad coffee, and these cream pies, that in eating this pie and drinking this coffee, somehow something more is going to happen, something that lifts up the hearts of those who are present into the Kingdom.

And in fact there are moments where that Kairotic breakthrough does occur in Home, and other moments where it doesn't, and in that case, the kitchen is still there, and the coffee is still there, and there's a kind of sad, hopefulness in that, even if there aren't any sort of exhilarating moments.

Carmel Howard: The hospitality of the Boughton kitchen does offer moments of comfort for the family, but it doesn't provide the solace Jack yearns for.

Towards the end of Gilead, Jack comes to his godfather, John Ames, with a startling confession that he feels unable to make to his own father: he's in love with a black woman from Memphis named Della, and they have a young son together. Jack and his family have been living in St Louis, where it's been legally and socially impossible for them to make a home together.

Jack's situation brings home the legacy of slavery and the issue of racial justice. Despite the town of Gilead's radical abolitionist beginnings a century earlier, and despite its freedom from anti-miscegenation laws, Jack has come to realise during his brief return, that his inter-racial family would not be welcome in the town.

Reader: He took a little leather case out of his breast-pocket and opened it and held in front of me. His hand was not steady, and I had to put on my reading glasses, but then I could see it fairly well. It was posed like a portrait photograph - himself, a young woman and a boy about five or six. The woman was seated in a chair with the child standing next to her, and young Boughton was standing behind them. It was Jack Boughton, a coloured woman, and a light-skinned coloured boy. Boughton looked at the picture and then he snapped the case shut, and slipped it back into his pocket. He said, 'You see' and his voice was so controlled, it sounded bitter, 'you see, I also have a wife and child'. Then he just watched me for a minute or two, clearly hoping he would not have to take offence.

'That's a fine-looking family', I said. He nodded. 'She's a fine woman. He's a fine boy. I'm a lucky man'. He smiled. 'And you're afraid this might kill your father?' He shrugged. 'It came near enough killing her father. And her mother. They curse the day I was born.' He laughed, and touched his hand to his face. 'As you know, I have considerable experience antagonising people, but this is on another level entirely.'

I was thinking my own thoughts. So he said, 'Maybe not, maybe that's just how it seems to me-', and then he sat there studying his hands. So I said, 'Well, how long have you been married?' and regretted the question. He cleared his throat. 'We are married in the eyes of God, as they say, who does not provide a certificate, but who also does not enforce anti-miscegenation laws. The Deus Absconditus at His most benign. Sorry.' He smiled. 'In the eyes of God we have been man and wife for about eight years. We have lived as man and wife a total of seventeen months, two weeks and a day.' I remarked that we have never had those laws here in Iowa, and he said, 'Yes, Iowa, the shining star of radicalism.'

From Gilead (Virago 2005)

Sarah Churchwell: He's come home to try to find a place for his common-law black wife and half-black, half-white son, and because of the miscegenation laws in the South, they have not been able to live together, they have not been able to get married legally. He says at the end of Gilead that they're only married in the eyes of God, because the State won't marry them, and he's come back to Iowa hoping against hope, that there will be a refuge and haven for his family, but there isn't. And he leaves again, without reuniting with his family, because he thinks it's better if he leaves his wife and son, better for them. And the sadness, the bleakness of that sense of somebody desperately trying to do the right thing, but finding the world inhospitable to his attempts to redeem himself, because Jack Boughton actually has a very problematic past. He has done some very bad things.

But he's actually trying to improve, and supposedly America is a country that believes in redemption, supposedly it's a country that believes in people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and starting over and clean slates and all of that kind of thing. And yet there's a sense in Home in which the whole idea of home, whether it is your family home or your homeland, your country's home, that there are certain people that are simply not welcomed home, and that can't find that refuge, can't find that security, can't find that safety, and there's something very true and very, very sad about that.I think she's brilliant on the ways in which well-intentioned people can live together and yet entirely fail to understand each other and entirely fail to communicate, and that that's a failure of what home ought to be; that home ought to be this place where you know, in that famous Robert Frost line that 'Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to let you in'. That's basically I think the way that home functions in Home, that home is the place where they want to let him in, and he wants to come home, and yet none of them can quite pull it off.

Reader: I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell, for all the truth there is in it and the fault is mine as much as anyone's. I was thinking about the things that had happened here just in my lifetime - the droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars. It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by, to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand. The word 'preacher' comes from an Old French word, predicateur which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet, except to find meaning in trouble? Well, we didn't ask the question, so the question was just taken away from us. We became like the people without the Law, people who didn't know their right hand from their left. Just stranded here. A stranger might ask why there is a town here at all. Our own children might ask. And who could answer them?

SONG: 'There is a Balm in Gilead'

Carmel Howard: Reverend John Ames knows that he and the other good Christians of Gilead have settled for a comfortable personal piety, at the expense of justice and compassion. His lament at the end of the novel recalls the biblical town of Gilead, and the prophet Jeremiah's cry, 'Is there no balm in Gilead/Is there no physician there?' The biblical town of Gilead has a complex history as a place of both healing and battle. It's criticised because it's been hard-hearted; it's lamented because it's been destroyed. And yet it's also used as a symbol of hope and restoration.

Gilead, Iowa, in 1956, doesn't provide the refuge or the redemption Jack Boughton hopes for; and it didn't fulfil the dreams of racial justice of John Ames' grandfather. But at the end of Marilynne Robinson novel Gilead, there is a sense of what might be hoped for, and what might be restored.

Reader: Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself, and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave -that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands, and to do nothing to honour them is to do great harm. And therefore this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing....I can't help imagining that you will leave sooner or later, and it's fine if you have done that, or you mean to do it. This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope.

I love this town, and I think sometimes of going into the ground here, as a last wild gesture of love - I too will smoulder away the time until the great and general incandescence. I will pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.

From Gilead (Virago 2005)

Carmel Howard: You've been listening to Encounter on ABC Radio National, and a program called 'The Balm in Gilead', about the American writer, Marilynne Robinson.

My thanks to Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Churchwell and Cynthia Rigby.

Eugene Gilfedder read from Gilead, and Sarah Kanowski read from Home, both published by Virago.

Technical production was by Jim Ussher, and I'm Carmel Howard.

Guests

Marilynne Robinson

Author

Dr Sarah Churchwell

Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture, The University of East Anglia, Norwich UK